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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
K. A. Tanaka, A. Hassanein, Y. Hirooka, T. Kono, S. Misaki, T. Ohishi, A. Sunahara, S. Tanaka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 329-333
Materials Development & Plasma-Material Interactions | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12374
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Laser ablation scheme can cover pretty wide range of intensity regime as a heat source at its laser focus spot from 103 W/cm2 to 1014 W/cm2. These intensities cover the ones expected at the divertor (MFE) and the first walls (IFE) in a reactor. For example expected values are of 10 to 100 MW/m2 at MFE divertor and 109 W/cm2 or higher at IFE first walls. The ablation may include plasma, gas, liquid, or solid: all possible phases mixed at an extreme condition where temperature may exceed 1 eV with corresponding densities. The areas of these mixed phases at extreme conditions (MPEC) have not been systematically studied. The inside of the solid wall becomes so called “Warm Dense Matter” where the details of the states should still be clarified.In our experimental setting up, the ablated plumes can be aligned orthogonally and can cross each other. The collision processes include Coulomb, elastic, molecular, and cluster collisions at the cross point. The characteristics of this experimental platform are introduced and attractive application is indicated.